Internment of Japanese Americans, Book Review Example

Reflection on the displacement and confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is the focus of scholarly query in Alice Yang Murray’s (2000) edited volume, “What did the internment of Japanese Americans mean?” Often a silent legacy in recollections of historical wrongs conducted on American citizens, the Nikkei experience is unique in that it remains more submerged in the consciousness of the survivors than those articulated by other minority groups whom have activated social struggle through the dialogue of memory. If Pearl Harbor is a moniker of in the memories of those who fought in the Pacific, the lesser told story of the immediate aftershock imposed upon Japanese American citizens offers a more complete picture of those events, and their implications for all Americans in the forthcoming decades.

Since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, open contention over the capacity of the United States government to stipulate discriminatory legal rules and attendant policy concerning ‘race’ difference, and including interpretations of ‘ethnic’ classification as ‘national origin’ has dissipated the authority of previously taken for granted assumptions about the right of the state to accuse, incarcerate or perpetrate abuses against citizens for any reason other than evidenced misconduct proven by due process in a court of law.

Retraction of existing rules which segregated society prior to that period has done much to clarify the flexibility of law and its provenance as ‘truth’ and as sovereign governance.  As we can see in Roger Daniels, The Decision for Mass Evacuation, the commencement of Nikkei internment in the U.S. marked the decision toward official institution of a police state in the West – something that has continued as a tradition within the range of socially acceptable state policies to the present.   

Peter Irons looks at in Gordon Hirabayashi v. United States: A Jap’s a Jap, those who were removed and confined for four years in sixteen camps located throughout the western half of the United States based on wartime policy with Axis Japan. Those who were mandated to encampment endured great hardship – losing associations, businesses, property and legal protection under law. This included “Japanese Americans” from the rest of the Americas as well, as all Nikkei, argues Michi Weglyn in Hostages as visitors from Latin America of Japanese descent found themselves amongst the ‘captured’at a time when  foreign policy on this type of act by a nation-state was hardly existent.

Conditions deplorable, the concentration camps enforced unnecessary humiliation and suffering, and the opacity of the selections shows that the U.S. government’s role in planning and carrying out the those internments a despicable tendency within the ideological current that substitutes democratic dominion with the authoritarianism the state argued it was fighting against for liberation of others in Europe and the South Pacific. The uncanny imposition of totalitarian insistence by the state reveals the absolute paranoia underneath the proliferation of propaganda and patriotic fantasy. Potential treason was the fear, and indeed incarceration followed those ‘sentenced;’ guilty by name alone. Normally a capital crime, with maximum sentencing of death, the only optimism that may be cited in deserved critique of U.S. policy regarding individual rights is that reservation of capital punishment spared those Nikkei so that they might tell their story to the next generation of Nisei, America and the world.

While many note that the silence present within the aftermath of the experience is indicative of Japanese and even Japanese American culture in the face of what might be misinterpreted as implicated shame, the current of writers on the topic in recent years have captured those events at a distance at the dawn of their twilight years. Still as Gary Y. Okihiro shows in Tule Lake under Martial Law: A Study of Japanese Resistance, Nikkei everywhere resisted using whatever viable means possible to construct legal argument against the state. As former internees ended their silence in the 1970s, thirty years of internalized pain began to emerge as Nikkei began to map their trauma through a collective lens that might do personal and social justice to the harm that had been done. Nikkei included in the volume’s compendium of essays share a common history and of course future stake in how memory is shaped in representation of that era, and its continuity in and through their families and the identity of their community.

During the next decade, increased focus on Japanese Americans’ WWII experience advanced discussion and publication on the topic, and interest in seeking retribution turned into organized legal action. Testimony to the Supreme Court resulted in the enactment in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which authorized government apology and payment of a mere $20,000 in retribution to survivors. Comparatively speaking, the response is embarrassing in consideration of the United States government’s capacity to offer substantial remedy to citizens subjected to state sponsored torture. Citizens in South America, and their surviving families received sums of approximately $300,000 per party in parallel lawsuits against those states. This of course is what is at issue. The parameters of the international human rights law as defined by the United Nations of which the U.S. is signatory to since its inception at the close of WWII allow for this type of consideration and provision.

As generations struggle to make sense of the Japanese American internment experience we ought to do much thinking about what that history and its outcome means in terms of our individual freedoms, and overall potential as a democratic nation. Rebuilding one’s life after the internment experience is a battle on its own, to be subjected to quite obvious, and officially sanctioned discrimination in a court of the land commemorates the radical racism and other discrimination that remains a central framework to the institution that is ‘our country.’

Works Cited

Murray, Alice Yang, ed. What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Murray, A. Y. Military Necessity, World War II Internment, and Japanese American History. Reviews in American History25.2, 1997, 319-325.